Fortunately, cartooning is not a job. It's something like eating or sleeping.
Freedom is not an individual effort. Yours comes only when you grant others theirs
I keep very weird hours. I never know when I'm going to get an idea.
My father was very political. But he told me, "Be very careful when you get into politics, because there's no black and white. There's an in-between in everything. So look at that side, don't take one point, because then you are negating half of the other people. Try to find the logic on a problem, something that you believe, and take the position that you believe, but be very careful about it." So I was very well trained in that aspect.
I think that true horror is accomplished by slowly getting into your brain. The old way is much more scary.
My best sources are my travels and my collection of National Geographic.
The difference between me and many young people is, I don't carry music with me. I like to think. I don't use any modern convenience to be talking to other people, because I like my time to think. I go to the garden in the morning, and this time, I'm thinking ideas, I'm not drawing, I'm thinking.
Many of the American cartoonists that want to have a job and go so much for the total right without thinking, sometimes they get a slap on the face when their politician lets them down. So it goes on and on. The thing is staying in the middle and not getting committed, trying to get the best of both and do that with a sense of humor.
When you're drawing comics, you get very involved in how the story is going to develop and you spend more time daydreaming on that particular subject.
If a cat had a halo, it would probably wear it around it's tail. It makes a statement.
If I see that something is wrong, I don't care who says it. Whether it's a Republican or Democrat, the left or the right. If they are on the opinion of the right thing, that's what I will talk about. I won't proselytize or make the strong things to influence other people about any particular politics, except the decency of things, the logic of things. That's why I don't get that much involved in politics directly.
A comic book is the opposite of a cartoon. In a cartoon, you want to simplify the idea, so when they look at it at a glance, they get it. Boom. Simple. Direct to the point. But when you're drawing Groo, now it's a narrative, a story. You want the viewer to get involved in the story. You want him to feel like he's in the town to follow your main character. So I love to add lots and lots of things in it. Things that people will enjoy going back to and say, "Oh yeah, that's how a market must have looked in this fantasy world, with people selling meat here and dishes here."
The reason I love comics more than anything else is that the longest story will be just a few pages. With a novel, it takes so many pages to get to one thing happening.
The Boogeyman is your conscience. The Boogeyman is the result of your own bad behavior. I love this Boogeyman.
When sadness happens in the middle of work, I separate my personal grief from my train of thought.
When I'm drawing a bottle or a town or a market, I transport myself there. So I start drawing everything that I'm looking at while I'm there. Here's a guy selling the meat, and he will have a hook, and you start adding things, and it's a lot of fun.
If the gag is complicated, you spend more time thinking about the way you’re drawing it.
I have always loved horror very much. I used to write stories for DC's House of Mystery. It was one of my first jobs writing for comics, and I loved it.
My work is so unorthodox that from one panel to the next, the drawings are completely different... totally opposed to the way of working in something like animation, where every drawing has to look like the one before.
I don't enjoy the boo scare when you're watching a movie and then suddenly there's a big shark on the screen. The only thing they're doing is catching you off guard.
I live in a very small town and now that I've closed down my studio, I'm working at home.
Anyone can write a story based on the kind of horror where you see a guy in car and then there's the bad guy in the back seat. It's infantile to rely on that for telling a story. That's like going to bed and thinking there's a monster under your bed. It's silly.
Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they're short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.
Eventually I would like to touch all the genres. I would like to do some detective stories, and I want to do a Western. I would want to do humorous Westerns.
Comics is a great medium to get a lot of stories out.
